Idea Lab

Lessons Learned from ReportingOn

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In 2008, I was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant to build ReportingOn, a back channel for beat reporters to share ideas, information, and sources. The goal of the project was to provide journalists of all stripes with a place to talk about content -- not craft, or process, or skillset. I taught myself enough Django -- and sought out advice from friends and co-workers with little regard for their interest or priorities -- to launch the first iteration of the site in October 2008. In July 2009, with fresh design and development from the team at Lion Burger, ReportingOn...

• December 30, 2010
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How Mark Luckie Created 'The Digital Journalist's Handbook'

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's an increasingly common story in the news business: Young journalist roars out of graduate school at Berkeley, gets a great job at a magazine in New York, works like mad, gets laid off when the economy tanks, turns to his blog and Twitter to brand himself a rock star in his field, publishes a book packed with the tips, tricks, and tutorials he's been blogging about, then gets a great gig with a non-profit news startup back in California. Okay, so maybe it's not all that common a career path, but it's the way things have unfolded for Mark...

• March 15, 2010
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Q&A 2.0: There's More Than One Way to Answer a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Since ReportingOn launched with a new Question & Answer format in July 2009, a few new entries in what I'll call the Q&A 2.0 space have popped up and grown their base of users. Here's a look at three Q&A 2.0 applications with wide appeal. Aardvark Aardvark allows users to ask questions via instant message, the website, Twitter, and an iPhone app, among other ways. I've used IM for the most part, answering questions about Twitter, iPhone apps, and journalism from time to time, while fending off questions about SEO, and using my favorite Aardvark feature to refer questions to...

• January 14, 2010
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I Wouldn't Want to Belong to Any Twitter List That Would Have Me as a Member

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Networks are funny. As soon as they get big enough to have a lot of value, it gets harder to separate the signal from the noise. That's obvious enough -- just ask anyone using AT&T in an area densely populated with bandwidth-hogging iPhone users like me. Or ask any Twitter user. But with the launch of Twitter Lists in recent days, it's now theoretically easier for users, news organizations, bloggers, and companies to create little tributaries off the main river of news. Bu building these subsets out of the main stream, you can find tweets from a group of users,...

• November 6, 2009
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The Shocking Truth About Journalism, Activism, and the Healthcare Reform Debate

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

A few weeks ago, I spotted a link to something called deathpanels.org getting passed around Twitter, and quickly traced its origin to Matt Thompson, Knight Foundation interim online community manager and general champion of contextual journalism. (Note: deathpanels.org is an independent project of Matt's, and not affiliated with the Knight Foundation.) Remembering a conversation that I had with Matt and others at a recent conference, I realized the idea had been brewing for some time. A few minutes after I looked at the site for the first time, I called up Matt to talk about the idea. Listen to...

• September 4, 2009
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The People Formerly Known as the Audience Need a New Name

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I'm not one for semantic arguments. There's little-to-no practical value in deciding the names of things. ("User-generated content," anyone?) But if you spend your days and side projects talking to journalists about interacting with their readers, you tend to look for the right words to get your message across. Or at least I do. Because they're not really "readers" anymore, are they? The people formerly known as the audience? Accurate, but wordy -- and maybe a little too professorial for my usual purposes. So what do we call the human beings who both consume the journalism we produce and participate...

• July 21, 2009
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Lessons Learned in Rollout of ReportingOn 2.0

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Those of you who have been keeping score surely noticed that I've saddled the iteration of ReportingOn that launched late on July 1 with a "2.0" label when I talk about it. Many of you might remember what the backchannel for beat reporters looked like before the clock struck "late" on July 1: That's what it looked like, and it did some interesting things, but not as much as I would have liked. And so began the process of building 2.0. And with it, the cataloging of lessons learned from the first run. Here's what it looks like now, almost...

• July 14, 2009
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ReportingOn 2.0 Launches Next Generation of Backchannel for Your Beat

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

ReportingOn 2.0 is live and ready for your questions. And answers. It's still the backchannel for your beat, but it's an absolute re-imagining of the network. For those of you who haven't been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it's a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source. (You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts right here at IdeaLab.) The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that...

• July 2, 2009
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'Alive in Tehran' Lets Iranian Citizens Report Through Voicemail

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been following Brian Conley's work at Alive in Baghdad since October 2007, when I met him at the Networked Journalism summit at CUNY. Conley -- somewhat more commonly known as Baghdad Brian -- is one of the few supporters of citizen journalism with several trips to wartime Iraq under his belt. In this interview, Conley talks about his recent project, Alive in Tehran. Listen to the full interview here (15:35) or right-click to download the mp3. Full transcript follows, with links added: Ryan: Hey this is Ryan Sholin here, I'm recording this today for PBS Idea Lab, and I'm...

• June 24, 2009
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An Update on ReportingOn 2.0 Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's an eight-minute tour of ReportingOn 2.0, as it stood on our development server on Tuesday June 17, 2009. I'm extremely psyched to report that we're on track for a July 1 launch of the second phase of this Knight News Challenge funded project. As a quick refresher, ReportingOn 1.0 launched back in October 2008, as a rather Twitter-like backchannel for beat reporters to connect based on common interests. Some pieces of the first iteration worked out well, and some of them -- well, we learned a lot. What's next? Launching version 2.0 on July 1, releasing the open source...

• June 19, 2009
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Help Me Investigate: Paul Bradshaw on Crowdsourcing Investigative Reporting

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

On June 1, Paul Bradshaw of the Online Journalism Blog and Birmingham City University in the U.K. announced that a project he's been working on for 18 months called Help Me Investigate won funding to build a platform for crowdsourcing investigative journalism. I spoke with Paul via Skype about the goals of the project, the nature of the funding, and what he calls "slow journalism." You can find Paul on Twitter or follow the project's progress at the Help Me Investigate blog if you have questions for him, or leave a comment here....

• June 3, 2009
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The ReportingOn Roadshow: Feedback and Notes from San Jose and Philadelphia

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

It's been a busy few weeks for ReportingOn, with development of Phase 2 continuing behind the scenes, and a lot of public conversation about the network's start and continuation as I've traveled to San Jose and Philadelphia in recent days. In San Jose, I gave a short talk on ReportingOn as part of my requirements at San José State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, where I've now finished up a graduate degree. The audience, mostly made up of my fellow grad students and the faculty, had some great questions and feedback for me, much of it focused on...

• May 6, 2009
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ReportingOn: Phrased in the Form of a Question

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

When I last wrote here to report on ReportingOn's progress, I talked about the work I was doing with my development and design team to define the terms of the RO pitch. A dozen or so whiteboards later, the Lion Burger team is actively putting together mockups and the beginnings of the database for what we're calling "Phase 2" of the project. And it's a huge rethinking of what a "back channel for your beat" looks like. While it's been easy to tag the initial version of ReportingOn as simply "Twitter for journalists," journalists already have a Twitter. It's called...

• March 26, 2009
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Life After Newspapers: One Reporter Takes on the Island of Alameda

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Bit of a busy couple weeks for those watching the newspaper business. The presses stopped at the Rocky and the P-I, Clay Shirky and Steven B. Johnson took turns penning big think pieces about the Future of News(papers), and -- good news -- the San Diego Union-Tribune looks like it will sell to a private equity firm. So what does life after newspapers look like, especially in major-metro-adjacent neighborhoods? I asked one reporter-turned-blogger about the local news site she started after leaving the Bay Area Newspaper Group, the chunk of Dean Singleton's MediaNews that includes the Oakland Tribune and a...

• March 18, 2009
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It's 'Bring a Professor Night' for a Conversation About Journalism Education

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

This Sunday, February 22, at 8 p.m. EST, it's "Bring a Professor Night" at CollegeJourn, a weekly live online chat about student media and journalism education. I spoke with Suzanne Yada today about the chat, why it's so important to bring the faculty to the table, and what she thinks they can learn from their students. Suzanne is one of the CollegeJourn moderators, and a student at the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at San Jose State University. (Full disclosure: I'm still finishing up my graduate degree in the same department.) (Help transcribe or translate this video at dotSub.)...

• February 18, 2009
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ReportingOn is Back in the Lab, Defining the Terms of the Pitch

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

[I'm going back to the proverbial drawing board for ReportingOn, working with the development and design team at Lion Burger to build the next iteration of the backchannel for your beat from scratch, more or less. Here's some of what we're talking about in front of the whiteboard...] I've been pitching ReportingOn using the same set of phrases for more than a year now, but until I sat down with my new development team earlier this month, it hadn't occurred to me that the entire scope of the project was actually encapsulated in those little slogans. For example: "It's the...

• February 14, 2009
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ReportingOn: Changing Horses Mid-Stream is Easy When You're the Horse

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

DIY development, design, community management, and marketing isn't for me (this year). This is an update about what's going on with ReportingOn, which is to say, there's not much going on with ReportingOn. For now. My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1. I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest. Now that...

• December 12, 2008
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The Pitch: Bringing Together Seattle's Best Media Minds

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

So here's The Pitch: Put together some of the smartest, most engaged, passionate thinkers about the changing media landscape in a room, buy them a few drinks, and let the conversation flow. That's the premise behind a series of meet-ups in Seattle, put together by Jason Preston, a social media consultant with the Parnassus Group. Jason blogs at Eat Sleep Publish along with Mónica Guzmán, a reporter and blogger at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (Here's a BeatBlogging.org interview Pat Thornton did with Mónica about cultivating conversation.) If the premise of The Pitch sounds familiar, check out the Copycamp archives for ideas...

• November 20, 2008
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Stack Overflow Sets an Example for News Commenting Systems

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Here's a poorly-kept secret: I hang out with Web developers all day. And by their nature, Web developers tend to be Web savvy, and Web natives. Which means they are already using and hacking and rebuilding the next big thing online before most of us have ever laid our eyes on it. Like this one: Stack Overflow. Stack Overflow is a service where programmers can ask and answer questions. That's all. Not too complicated when you describe it that way. But hidden in that description is a valuable system of voting and rating, where users earn points (call it Karma...

• November 14, 2008
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Microblogging Tools for your Newsroom

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I thought about ReportingOn for more than a year before the public beta launched on October 1; I turned the idea over in my head, scrawled back-of-a-napkin sketches, and built several HTML prototypes before I ever got close to building something with dynamic code. While I was going through that process of refining the idea and deciding which features were crucial and which would just be gravy, it turned out that a lot of other people were trying to solve the same problem, although not strictly with journalists in mind. Here are some of the ways you can build a...

• October 16, 2008
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One Week of ReportingOn, International Style

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

One week after launching ReportingOn in a public beta that's helping me prioritize features and fix bugs in my programming, there is one big surprise: The large international turnout. The Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking media blogosphere appears to be truly excited about the idea of Twitter para periodistas, even as I try to differentiate from Twitter as fast as I can. Pablo Mancini, interactive services manager at the beautifully designed El Comercio of Lima, Peru, interviewed me by e-mail yesterday. Rodrigo Orihuela handled the translation, so if your Spanish is up to the task, you can read the exchange posted on...

• October 8, 2008
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Why ReportingOn Launched on Django

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

First things first: ReportingOn is live, it's a public beta, and it's built in Django. Whoo-hoo! I have a long list of things to polish, add, tweak, revise, and rethink, but it was time to open the site up to users and let them help me figure it out. Last time I wrote about the options I was considering for Web development, I was leaning toward Django and away from Drupal. Here's why I gave up on Drupal for this project and moved on to Django: Drupal is a fantastic content management system out of the box, with little --...

• October 3, 2008
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Can the Political Press Self-Correct? Spinewatch Hopes it Can

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Fellow IdeaLabber Jay Rosen, an NYU journalism professor and PressThinker, mounted a campaign this weekend to encourage the political press to grow a spine. Rosen and others are calling for journalists of all stripes (professionals, amateurs, citizens, bloggers, etc.) to use a #spinewatch tag on Twitter and elsewhere to call attention to whether or not the professional press covering the home stretch of the 2008 presidential election is standing up to stonewalling candidates or sitting back and repeating their talking points. In an IM interview today, Jay said: "The premise behind spinewatch is more this: It's hard for me to...

• September 15, 2008
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Five Ways to Gather and Report News with Twitter

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I read Chris O'Brien's IdeaLab post about the latest Twitterquake and the 10 (so far) comments with a great deal of interest. After all, ReportingOn borrows a great deal from Twitter, and I've been writing about the exponentially growing micro-blogging service for around a year now. I can't help but notice that a commenter or two seem to think that anyone actually takes is seriously when Twitter asks its base question of "What are you doing?" This is what makes it easy for those who haven't sipped from the Tweetstream to write it off as crap for tweens. Actually, that's...

• August 3, 2008
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An Introduction to ReportingOn

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

I've been writing about ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, in fits and starts for 11 months now, but it's time to backtrack for a moment and answer some simple questions about what I'm up to here. Q: So, what's ReportingOn? A: ReportingOn.com will be a simple way for journalists to update their peers on the stories they're working on right now. Tag your 140-character-or-less updates with the beat you're on, and find peers reporting on similar beats to make connections, introduce yourself to potential mentors, or discover an unsung hero. Q: When you say "journalists," who are you talking...

• July 14, 2008
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Exploring a Range of Development Options

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

In the past few weeks, I've ramped up development of ReportingOn. Of course, for me, that means I'm spending time early in the morning and late at night exploring different options, creating mockups, ditching everything I've done and starting over again. Here's a few paths of exploration I've been down lately: Drupal: Drupal 6 isn't ready for what I need it to do. The Views and CCK modules aren't up to speed yet, or maybe I just haven't found the right set of instructions yet. That brings me to my biggest complaint about Drupal: Although there's a huge open source...

• June 30, 2008
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TimesPeople a Puzzling Piece of NYT Development

by Ryan Sholin
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

TimesPeople is the beginning of a social network from the New York Times. Sort of. It's a pleasant interface and a clever application, living in the browser as a Firefox add-on that doesn't get in the way of my NYT browsing. It's simple: Hit the recommend button on any story or blog post and a link shows up in your activity stream and your friends can see that you recommended a story. The app is supposed to notice when I rate a restaurant or add a comment to a story, too, although I don't see that happening after a quick...

• June 20, 2008
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